Human Trafficking In America Is the Most Important Social Issue of Our Times

Just what is human trafficking?

Even though act of human trafficking has been going on for many years, it has only been a couple of years (2000) since the US Trafficking Protocol (the Palermo Protocol of 2000, a global legal agreement mounted on the US) was established containing the initial internationally arranged definition of human trafficking with the knowing that it is the force, fraud, and coercion from one person to the next that defines the essence of the crime.

People often tell me that they think human trafficking is moving folks from one country to another, and while that is a part of what the act is really, the heart of the problem is the mental and emotional movement of a person by another. The U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) (created as a result of the UN Protocol) leaves out what to me is the most significant aspect of this is and therefore helps it be more difficult to prove a case in court against alleged traffickers.

The heart of the U.N. Trafficking Protocol defines human trafficking as: the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or usage of force or other styles of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over someone else, for the intended purpose of exploitation.

The US-TVPA is weak and should include in it the terminology in keeping with the U.N. Protocol since it further distinguishes that traffickers use deception, and abuse of power, or of a posture of vulnerability, when seeking their victims. Traffickers look for the vulnerable focusing on how to deceive and manipulate them - the worst type of abduction - by causing one to lose rely upon those they ought to trust the most. It requires an eternity to "re-program" someone who has been manipulated this way.

Human trafficking should be placed at the top of the list of crucial social issues.

In current human trafficking advocacy circles, traditional methods of trafficking have been the focus and prohibit real discovery in to the reality of what is causing modern-day slavery.  innocentsatrisk.org , homelessness, runaways, broken families, senior high school drop-out rates, pornography (media): each are stand-alone social issues that merit our time and attention. Each brings using them a different group of problems that demand attention from those people who are whole inside our society. Yet when we look at human trafficking, we see most of these issues wrapped up in to the one almost just like a domino effect. Each of these issues is a contributing factor to those areas fueling human trafficking. And, I dare say, each one of these issues are due to one giant controlling america and manipulating our every move - greed. Traffickers not only search for vulnerable and at-risk youth, they target the male population to enlist them as buyers.